It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.

If you get a bad review, you take that in your stride.

I think the greatest reward you get as a writer is finding that people who are reasonably receptive and intelligent have liked your book.